Robot 6

There’s always a steady flow of new art to be seen at Chris Ryall’s Tumblr. The editor-in-chief of IDW Publishing recently saw a Jack Kirby tribute by Brendan McCarthy accompanying a ROBOT 6 story about soaring sales of the Dredd DVD, and contacted the legednary 2000AD artist to secure the use of that image, and to commission a series of covers in the style of other Silver Age greats. These will run as cover images — variants, I’d guess — for issues 13 to 16 of IDW’s ongoing Judge Dredd series:

I can identify the Steranko tribute as a direct reference to Captain America #111, and the Ditko homage as Beware the Creeper #1. The Infantino one is based on the classic image used as the cover art to the much-loved Batman from the 30’s to the 70’s Bonanza Book, but I’ll admit to not being au fait enough with the Silver Age at DC to know if that was the first appearance of that pose.

These are great: McCarthy has done a fine job of adopting not just the poses and some stylistic tics from the artists he’s paying tribute to, but subtler things like line weight and approaches to anatomy, too.